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Thursday, 31 July 2014

Since the coalition came to power, sick and disabled people have claimed we are being fundamentally harmed by the coalition welfare reforms. Not scroungers or skivers, but people living with long term serious illnesses like me, or who live with physical disabilities. Adults AND children. Young and old. People with terminal conditions, people with kidney or heart failure, people waiting for transplants and even people in comas. None have been spared. The government repeatedly assure you they have.

The government have of course denied that they are putting an unreasonable share of austerity cuts on us. Repeatedly and often aggressively. This is how they respond to the UN of all people :

Since 2011, almost every main voice involved in the services and systems that support sick and disabled people have argued that we must know how all of the changes TOGETHER have affected us so particularly.

Everything we rely on has been cut severely - in some cases by up to 40%. Disability benefits, sickness benefits, social care services, housing support, legal aid for tribunals, respite care, the independent living fund, council tax relief, higher education funding, everything.

It is very possible that if you were affected by one of the changes, you were affected by several or even all of them.

Whilst the government paid lip service to assessing what impact their reforms would have on sick and disabled people, they only did so one by one. They always claimed it was impossible to assess them all together and specifically, how they would affect disabled people when combined.

It has been a long and dishonest journey. As with so many things, the government have done everything in their power to keep the figures from the public.

They said that it wasn't possible despite a petition gathering over 100,000 signatures calling for what they called a "cumulative impact assessment" or CIA.

The government treated the debate it generated in parliament - a debate sick and disabled people themselves worked so hard for - like a Punch and Judy show of partisan nonsense. You can watch it for yourself if you click on the following link :

And finally, just 2 days ago, Lord Freud, the failed millionaire ex-banker who re-designed our entire welfare system in just 3 weeks, wrote an official response to the SSAC, the government's own Social Security Advisory Committee, who also called for a CIA relating to disability, confirming yet again, that he believed it was impossible to assess all of the changes sick and disabled people have faced and claiming that the IFS, the all powerful Institute for Fiscal Studies, agreed with him.

This was yet another lie from Freud - there is no other word for it. As the IFS have confirmed

“We can’t find anything we have written down saying we can’t do a CIA....We do think it is possible to do a CIA of tax and benefit changes for the disabled population as a whole."

"Figure 4.9 shows that households with disabled children lose out by more in cash terms than households with disabled adults, with households with disabled children and adults losing out by more than either group – around £1,500 per household per year on average.

"Households with no disabled adults or disabled children in
the 7th and 8th deciles [wealthier households] actually gain slightly from the reform package, whereas
households with disabled adults or children (or both) lose out. At the bottom of the
distribution, households with no disabled people, or with disabled adults, do not lose
as much on average as households with disabled children, or both disabled adults
and children. In percentage terms the distributional effects are fairly regressive
across all four groups, with households with disabled adults and children doing worst
of all up to the top decile."

As one of the authors, Jonathan Portes says in an article for the Guardian today

"Modelling the cumulative impact is feasible and practicable – at least by gender, age, disability and ethnicity. Our model isn’t perfect and could be improved, but it can be done.....Families that have a disabled adult or child lose perhaps five times as much proportionally as better-off able-bodied families."

There is now absolutely no doubt at all that sick and disabled people have been hit over and over again by a barrage of cuts and the more vulnerable the family; the more disabled people within it; the more they have lost. The DWP, Iain Duncan-Smith, Lord Freud and many right wing media outlets have kept this information from the public through every possible means. They will probably do so again today.

Think tanks and charities and many journalists know that this is hugely significant. And as ever, we can and will make our own news.

PLEASE, CROSS POST THIS IF YOU HAVE A BLOG, WRITE ABOUT IT IF YOU HAVE A COLUMN, FIND A SLOT FOR IT IF YOU ARE A PRESENTER, TWEET IT OR SHARE IT IF YOU ARE A SOCIAL MEDIA USER, SEND IT TO EVERYONE AND ANYONE YOU THINK MIGHT CARE OR WHO COULD HELP YOU GET IT TO A WIDER AUDIENCE.

YOU CAN USE THE BUTTONS BELOW THIS ARTICLE TO SHARE IT TOO.

We now know that this government have harmed the very people they promised us they would protect. They have harmed the very people that voters never wanted to be harmed. They have lied about the harm being done at every stage and have actively tried to keep it from both parliament and the media.

If ever a story needed to be seen and understood, it is this. If you never bothered to click on the links in an article for more information before, click on these. It is a shameful and repellant story and those responsible have no place whatsoever within 100 miles of Westminster.

Friday, 25 July 2014

But I dearly love the remarkable characters who've stepped up (or hobbled in many cases) to face it.

We are often unlikely warriors, with our limps and our oxygen tanks and our feeding tubes. But perhaps there was something the DWP didn't realise. Far from being easy victims, weak and helpless, it turned out (as we argued all along) that we were unbreakable.

Doctors hadn't broken us, endless hospital stays hadn't broken us, misdiagnoses, constant forms and judgement and unnecessary bureaucracy hadn't broken us. "Suffering" or "Hunger" or "Terror" might be abstract terms for most, but we had triumphed over them all. Some of us for decades in an endless Groundhog Day loop. How ironic that the DWP thought they had picked the most vulnerable targets of all, but found, in fact, that no elite crack squad of Royal Marines fight as hard as a group of sickies faced with destitution.

And so it is with Steve Sumpter and the "20 Metre Rule" "Latent Existence" to many through his blog and twitter accounts.

This is a long and tortuous story that I will try to cut short. The government decided that they were going to scrap Disability Living Allowance, the main benefit (for some 3.2 million, in OR out of work) that covers the extra cost of being disabled. There wasn't a hint of it in their manifesto. The new benefit (Personal Independence Payments or PIP) aimed to cut 20% from the existing "caseload". Whether it had any aims other than cost cutting is unclear.

The first Spartacus Report exposed that the new scheme was almost unanimously opposed and that the case they were making for why it needed cutting at all was dishonest. Undeterred, they marched on, ignoring all advice and overturning every sensible amendment made to the changes in the Lords.

Just as the details of the new benefit were being finalised, with no consultation or prior warning, the government announced that the qualifying distance you were able to walk to qualify for full mobility support would be slashed by an inconceivable 60%. From 50 metres to just 20 metres. The government estimated that a whopping 600,000 disabled people would lose their support from this measure alone - to give you some idea, 20 metres won't get most people to their car or even to their own bathroom. We took the government to court, arguing that the lack of consultation was unlawful and we won. We forced them to consult properly before they could go ahead. A new Spartacus report showed that over 30,000 people would no longer be able to get to work if the changes went ahead directly contradicting claims the coalition have always made that these changes were about helping sick and disabled people INTO work.

From the new consultation, of 1142 responses just FIVE supported cutting the distance to qualify for mobility support from 50 metres to 20 metres. The government ignored the consultation and went ahead with the change anyway. That, is not illegal.

So we took them to court again. With the unfailing support of Leigh Day Solicitors and Public Law Solicitors, we challenged the 20 metre rule itself.

That sounds easy doesn't it? But I think we forget that one brave individual has to be the "test case". One person has to stand up and say "OK, I'll put myself through all of this on your behalf." Going to court is unpleasant in every way - it's stressful, intimidating, frightening and physically demanding. Your life is exposed along with every last one of your insecurities. And you, small, insignificant, you must take an entire government to Judicial Review. If ever David and Goliath fitted modern allegory it is this. To top it all, Steve has ME along with other congenital conditions that make this fight more demanding than most will ever know.

The fact that he will detest this post and chastise me for writing it says everything about the man and his tirelessly supportive partner - who incidentally has given up her own successful career to be his carer. Let's not forget that all around the country people make this decision every day and get almost no support for doing so, saving the government £119 BILLION in the process.

As with so many of the cases, the court have ruled that the change itself was not unlawful. But as with every other case we have bought, they listed a litany of criticism and rebuke over both the way and the means they have used to push changes through.

But you can't challenge policy. How about that? I had no idea before I started all of this. A government can pretty much do anything they like and you cannot challenge their right to do so except in very rare and specific cases. All you can do is challenge the way they've bought changes in.

BUT. And here is the big but. In the course of the case, this quote came from the Department for Work and Pensions, presided over with tencious if incompetent zeal by Iain Duncan-Smith.

"This was recognised from the outset. In developing the PIP assessment we were aware that the vast majority of recipients of DLA were individuals with genuine health conditions and disabilities and genuine need, andthat removing or reducing that benefit may affect their daily lives. However, we believe that these impacts can be justified as being a logical result of distributing limited resources in a different and more sustainable way…”. DWP
(Paragraph 80)

As Steve says, let's say that again :

"In developing the PIP assessment we were aware that the vast majority of recipients of DLA were individuals with genuine health conditions and disabilities and genuine need, andthat removing or reducing that benefit may affect their daily lives. " DWP

So Steve has fought and some will say he lost - though it may be that there are still other avenues to follow. But from today, we can all say with utter certainty, that this government knew that PIP would cause harm to genuine people in need. But they justified it through austerity.

They took support from sick and disabled people that needed it to get to work or to get dressed or to buy special treatments, to pay for the risk-taking excesses of out of control financiers we apparently dare not make pay.

So people like Steve are paying, and fighting with everything they have - and very much they don't have. They're fighting for 3.2 million sick and disabled people to continue to live lives many take for granted every day in a million ways they aren't even aware of. I hope they never become aware of the kind of struggle Steve has faced through all of this.

But if you ever do, if you ever find yourself sick and frightened, if life ever turns upside down for you when you thought you were the very last person it could happen to, maybe people like Steve will have saved the very thing you don't even know you're losing.

Thursday, 24 July 2014

I wrote this post in January 2011. Just 8 months after Labour lost the election. Having somehow stumbled across it today, I think a) I seemed to know who Ed would be rather well and b) Douglas Alexander should read it right now.

"Sure, it's tough. You get kicked out of power and 5 minutes later people are screaming "Well what would you do? You haven't even got a policy!!" At the same time, they don't actually want you to have a policy yet, it's too soon. If you start spouting policies, the public will think you're arrogant, that you haven't learned anything from your recent defeat.

You need to accept that you made mistakes, but if you're not careful, you spend so much time in humility, it's hard to point out how the "other lot" could be any worse.

Activists sit nervously, wondering "Will there be passion?" Will there be the fire and brimstone they feel? "Who are we now and who will we be?"

That "Who will we be" is the big problem, isn't it? Who will we be?? What on earth is that? A person who has to ask who they will be hasn't a clue who they actually are. Surely nothing has damaged politics more than watching those who appeal to us for trust at the ballot box morph into whichever politically-hollow-chameleon they think we want to see. We've sunk helplessly into a swamp of "Who shall we be" and seem to have almost totally forgotten how to ask who we are.

In a policy vacuum or a period of consultation, it's that "who we are" that can guide opposition. No matter what the government announce, you know in your soul if you support it or not. You can agonise over your own policy positions until the end of time, but in the meantime, principle should fill the gap. Activists know those principles in their DNA. No-one needs to learn them or make sure they are "on message". Best of all, if you oppose on principal, on instinct, the public sense it. These days, they can smell the blood of hypocrisy from 100 miles. If you oppose by focus group and fear of the Daily Mail, they've switched off before you've finished your first sentence.

So, when Lansley announces his chaotic, destructive plans for effectively privatising the NHS, the principles of a universal service, free at the point of use are all you need to defend. You can support that principle violently without yet needing to say what you'd do instead.

When nurses or fire fighters or police officers face redundancies by the tens of thousands, you know that of all the people in society you need to fight for, to speak for, it's them. If you've just spent 13 years in government building up their numbers because the pursuit of excellence in our public services underpin everything you stand for, then the principle will always retain credibility.

When benefit changes mean that hundreds of thousands of the poorest members of society will lose their homes, forced to move away from everything they know and rely on, the principle, stamped indelibly on the back of your membership card, that we "live together freely" tells you all you need to know. When those same reforms threaten to leave paraplegics without wheelchairs or cancer patients without hospice care, then surely that is a direct threat on the ability to "realise our true potential?"

When banks announce £7 billion in bonuses as reward for a system that failed so utterly we will be paying off their greed for generations, "Power, wealth and opportunity" are hardly resting "in the hands of the many not the few." That underlying principle that forged the party and shaped your vision of society gives you the legitimacy to claim "Well, whatever we decide, no party of mine would ever support that."

The problem is that legitimacy isn't it? Labour can only claim those principles if they again hold them dear. One PFI scheme too many, one war too far and those principles are shaken. Suddenly we're worrying more about the "squeezed middle" or the "worthy poor" than the worries that underpin all of our lives.

The wealthy and powerful vote Labour too. In fewer numbers, certainly, but still in their hundreds of thousands. Not in self interest, but because they don't want to live in a gilded cage, sitting on a pile of cash while the poor starve and the sick suffer. They vote for the principles on the back of that Labour membership card. As long as the policies eventually reflect those principles, leaders can speak to all of us, not just to the contrived section of society focus groups favour that week - "Alarm clock Britain" "Mondeo Man" or "Worcester Woman." Perhaps most importantly of all, they might begin to speak again for the 35% or 40% of the population who no longer even bother to get up from their sofas and vote for anyone at all. The millions who believe politicians have no principles left.

Principles don't send you careering back to 70s militancy or 80s un-electability - far from it, they adapt to any time, simply underpinning the political compass, uniting a broad church of opinion behind a few unbreakable beliefs. They keep the Blairite and the Union leader fighting together, benefiting from each other's perspectives, safe in the knowledge that whichever policy ends up on the table, they will still be campaigning together to protect those vital principles.

A party that is frightened of it's principles looks hollow and unsure.

When Blair came to power, it was horses for courses. Labour had to finally prove that they could unify, it had to prove that whilst protecting Labour principles, they could slay Tory dragons. It had to shake the long held confidence of the Tories that only they would ever claim to be able to manage crime or inflation. The public wanted a massive reward for the trust they'd shown in allowing Blair not one but two unprecedented landslides. "Govern for us all" they said. Whatever you think of him now, his government achieved some basic principles that Labour had fought for since its birth - a minimum wage, free nursery education, excellence in health care and a passionate commitment to alleviating world poverty.

Ed finds himself leader of a party who lost their way. A party who forgot that whilst we govern for all, we fight for those who cannot fight alone. His great task is to prove that we remember why we exist. All the while there is still inequality, all the time we face exploitation, all the while people suffer injustice or prejudice they need a strong, confident Labour Party to show that their principles can offer the answers.

I don't think anyone wants him to fight Cameron on his own turf, as Cameron fought Blair and Blair fought Major. They want him to claim back the principles we allowed to fall away at times when reading that little membership card would have saved disgrace. Ed is no Cameron. He's inclusive and thoughtful and he's certainly no rudderless autocrat. If he allows our principles to shape his leadership and starts to convince the electorate that he knows instinctively what they are, then focus groups and tabloids start to lose their grip on policy making. I can't think there can be anyone in the UK who wouldn't agree that was long, long overdue.£

Thursday, 17 July 2014

It's July. Any minute now politicians will go on recess and won't really be back - what with Conference season - until October.

By October, it will be election frenzy central.

Our mendacious and slippery deputy Prime Minister has u-turned on the Bedroom Tax. There ALWAYS had to be an issue over which he decided to split from the coalition. He can hardly go into an election as the junior partner in a coalition can he? He will go into it as the leader of the Liberal Democrats, whatever we might think of that.

He has chosen his first big step away from Cameron's shadow to be about the Bedroom Tax. Specifically, he has chosen to highlight sick and disabled people within this policy.

I've said this so many times, but politics isn't a love affair. It always amazes me how people judge politicians on their honesty! Surely we must have learnt that this way lies madness? Why would we judge them emotionally, or on their consciences when experience has shown us since the beginning of time that they just don't work that way?

To politicians, politics is a game of chess they must win. No more and no less. We respond to them emotionally, when there is no emotion involved at all.

So today, almost every tweet is of "turncoats" and "opportunism". Yes, of course he's a turncoat, and of course he's opportunistic, what do we expect? But if politicians give you a chink, you crowbar it open.

Is it better to be used as a pawn or left out of the game entirely? Don't pawns have power of their own? Always remember, sometimes they can bring down a King.

It is our unwillingness to engage on their terms, to beat them at their own game, that mans they always win and we always lose. Today, I woke up thinking "How can I use this". I'm not really disgusted with Clegg at all, it would be like being disgusted with a wolf for being a wolf.

I'm faintly pleased he has given me an opportunity to crow a bit at Cameron, expose the cruelty of Bedroom Tax all over again and have a nice little smug glow of righteousness. But that's emotion.

I'm delighted that I can now say "The one issue that finally split the coalition was disability". That's spin, that's powerful and most of all, that leaves Cameron isolated.

When you judge a politician, leave your emotions behind. The only question we ever need to ask is why they've just done what they've done and can it be turned to our advantage. This little gem doesn't even need turning. It haz advantage written all over it.

So I would suggest we turn our tweets and post from howls of indignant hurt feelings into maximum crowbarring. Mock Cameron, revel in the rift and prise it as wide open as we can.

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About Me

I have a rare form of Crohn's Disease. I was diagnosed 21 years ago and have had many operations to remove strictures (narrowings in my bowel that grow like tumours) I suffer daily pain, often vomiting, malnourished and weak. I take mega-strong medications every day including chemo-style immuno-suppressants, opiates and anti-sickness injections. Sometimes I am fed into my central vein by tube, other times I can enjoy a nice meal out. I have children that I often can't look after and a husband who often looks after me.
Our lives are disrupted daily by the misery of a chronic condition.